Budget irony: Save a little now, pay more later

Tiffany Brown

Bus driver Oscar White uses one of the hand-held Zonar devices that save the Clark County School District more than $1 million a year in driver pay by shortening daily vehicle inspections.

By Emily Richmond

Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Small black boxes, about 6 inches square, could save the Clark County School District hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The global positioning system, or GPS, devices track the location and speed of school buses.

In tests, they eliminated an average of 30 minutes of idling per day, or $30 per vehicle per month in fuel costs. For the district’s entire bus fleet, the savings could total $420,000 per academic year.

But so far, only 36 of the district’s 1,450 school buses are GPS-equipped. By the end of the year, 71 buses will be outfitted.

That’s far short of the original goal of placing one on every district vehicle. But the budget crunch has made further expansion unlikely.

“We can see the huge potential for savings,” said Frank Giordano, the district’s vehicle maintenance director. “It’s the wrong time to ask for a large amount of money to do this, but in the long run it could really help the district.”

The situation underscores the fact that as the district reduces spending because of the state budget shortfall, some of the cuts have eliminated investments that could have saved a significant amount of money over the long term.

It’s an area that officials recognize could yield savings. In 2005, Legislative Counsel Bureau auditors recommended the district improve oversight of its “white-car” fleet, the vehicles driven by district personnel. Those findings were echoed the following year by independent auditors.

Tracking equipment has proved its worth to the district.

After placing a few portable GPS units on some vehicles in the white-car fleet, the transportation department determined that some cars were being driven at odd hours and “where they shouldn’t be,” and many employees didn’t need a district vehicle, Giordano said.

For example, the legal department’s late-model sedan was replaced with an older car after auditors determined the vehicle was being used almost exclusively for 10-mile trips to the courthouse. The 16-member legal staff now shares the car with two other departments.

“The more the merrier,” senior legal counsel Bill Hoffman told the Sun. “If they need to take the car back, that’s fine, too.”

The white-car fleet now stands at about 60 vehicles, down from more than 200.

Investments in similar tracking technology have also proven to be sound.

Four years ago, the district purchased an electronic inspection system to replace the written safety checklists that bus drivers were required to fill out daily.

The hand-held Zonar devices communicate with various points on the vehicle as drivers go through a series of instructions. At the same time, the district monitors the inspection, including whether the hood was opened for an engine check and how long it took to complete the inspection.

Zonar initially cost $520 per unit, or $530,400 for the 1,020 buses in the fleet at that time. Within six months, the system had paid for itself by reducing by 14 minutes a day the time each driver spent inspecting. That added up to $1.2 million a year in driver pay.

Still, this is the dilemma in which the district too often finds itself, making cuts to satisfy a short-term deficit at the expense of its long-range plans to operate more efficiently.

Some Clark County School District bus drivers, who have taken to calling the GPS devices the “tattle tale,” were glad the devices will be included in the budget cuts.

Giordano said he’s heard some of the griping about the electronic monitoring. But the criticism isn’t warranted, he said.

“If you’re out there doing the wrong thing, maybe you have something to worry about,” Giordano told the Sun. “If you’re doing your job, you don’t have to worry at all.”

Emily Richmond can be reached at 259-8829 or at emily@lasvegassun.com.